Understanding Barriers and Evaluating Pathways to the Long-Term Viability of Federally Funded Energy Efficiency Programs

In 2009, the U.S. Department of Energy allocated $508 million to the Better Buildings Neighborhood Program (BBP), a competitive grant program to spur a private energy efficiency retrofit market in the residential and commercial buildings sectors of the U.S. economy. The BBP was funded through the Obama administration’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, with the goal of creating jobs and impacting the economy through clean energy investments.

This report investigates one of the BBP grant recipient partners, the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance (SEEA), and the unique challenges of energy efficiency deployment in the Southeast. The analysis provides SEEA’s program managers with a framework to evaluate options for the long-term viability of their energy efficiency retrofit programs post-federal funding in 2013. These options were designed as a deliverable to SEEA in the form of a guidebook, which was completed in March 2012. Selected sections of the guidebook can be found in the Appendix and will be referenced throughout the report.

Additionally, this report will consider the current barriers that SEEA’s programs are facing and how they are impeding the organization’s likelihood of meeting goal criteria within the mandated time frame. The final recommendations will include programmatic changes that SEEA can adopt over the next year and a half to overcome both the short-term and long-term challenges of energy efficiency retrofit programs in the Southeast.